


A Terrible Idea

by apple_pi



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M, McKay/Sheppard - Freeform, SGA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-04
Updated: 2008-12-04
Packaged: 2017-10-02 03:27:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apple_pi/pseuds/apple_pi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Why now?" John asked in the morning. He hadn’t fled, and neither had Rodney. Where was there to go? John thought. They’d already come too far.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Terrible Idea

**Author's Note:**

> Set during the six-week hiatus on Earth, Season 3, _The Return, Part 1_.

"This is a terrible idea," John said more than once, and Rodney shook his head and denied it, head ducked to push his face into John’s neck, hands firm and close on John’s shoulder blades.

"I don't have terrible ideas," he said, and moved John back, pressed him gently against the door or down onto the bed, lowered himself over him, kissed him slow and careful and unexpectedly sweet.

Unexpected, all of it, but John never said no, and didn’t regret it. He’d learned which things to regret and which things to hold onto, no matter what the rules said, no matter what SGC and the IOC and the UCMJ might have to say about them. Rodney’s mouth on his, the low, desperate sounds he made and the ones he drew from John – no, there was nothing to regret, there.

~*~

Rodney had offered John his Colorado Springs apartment right at the start. John had accepted, for the moment. “Until...” He half-shrugged. “You know, something else.” _Until we go back_, he didn’t say, because already it felt unreal: Atlantis, Atlantis-as-home, or maybe this was the unreality. Whatever the case, John couldn’t talk about home, but couldn’t quite not talk about it. Rodney had nodded at his inarticulate face and given him the key, taken him over and shown him where everything was.

The second Friday after they’d come back, Rodney called from Nevada: He was hitching a ride, he said – some one-star was headed for Colorado Springs on a UH-60, and Rodney was lonely and he wanted to see someone he knew and also maybe pet his cat. Was it okay? Did John have company?

John – staring at his empty, silent office, boots on the desk – thought about Rodney’s empty (now clean) apartment and the silence there, and said No, no company, no worries. “You can sleep on the couch,” he’d said, grinning, and Rodney had actually paused.

“I slept there more than my bed anyway,” he’d replied, a small laugh in the words, and John’s grin had faded. Rodney was going on, telling John he’d pick up a pizza and see him around seven. John kept his voice easy as he agreed, but the little stab of sadness he’d felt stayed with him.

Rodney showed up at 7:30, pizza in one hand, six-pack of beer in the other.

And somehow they’d both ended up in John’s – no, Rodney’s – bed that night. Beer and sadness and loneliness, the pull of the familiar. And desire. God, desire that had been left untended for too long, till it grew all out of proportion (John thought, gasping, clutching at Rodney, who clutched him close in return), desire grown wild like a vine that’s been abandoned, fed by rain and sunlight and wind, water that’s too many light years away now, unreachable, incalculable.

Rodney buried kisses in John’s skin: the secret, hidden hollows of his elbows and knees, the dark sensitive places behind his ears, under his arms, beneath his balls, and John held on tight, dizzy and afraid and wanting so hard it hurt, until it didn’t anymore, for a while. Until the want and need coalesced and he was _right there_, making noises he didn’t think he’d ever made before, shaking, flying, falling, falling apart.

“Why now?” John asked in the morning. He hadn’t fled, and neither had Rodney. Where was there to go? John thought. They’d already come too far. He turned his face away but kept his hand where it was: resting on Rodney’s side, just over his hip. “Did you want to do this before?”

Rodney shifted under his hand; pushed until John was curled away on his side, and then spooned around him. “I don’t know why now,” he said, not answering the other question. “Do you want me to stop?” He lay kisses soft and slow along John’s nape; wrapped his large, precise hand around John’s dick and stroked him, long firm pulls.

“No,” John said, staring at the plain white wall opposite the bed; he said it again, and “don’t stop,” and “Rodney, Christ, ah,” as his head fell back and his hips rocked into Rodney’s grip, body covered and protected by Rodney’s body. He came with a choked-off groan and Rodney’s erection tucked snugly between his thighs. When he’d recovered enough to do it, he wriggled around and down and took Rodney’s cock into his mouth, sucking the head as he worked the shaft with his hand until Rodney moaned and came in three short pulses. It tasted weird but there wasn’t much (the night before had kind of made sure of that), so John swallowed and lay where he was, mouth loose around Rodney’s softening cock until Rodney pulled him up for a close-mouthed morning kiss.

“It’s okay then?” Rodney asked. His eyes were clear as water in the grey morning.

“It’s a hell of a way to avoid sleeping on the couch,” John said.

Rodney’s lips tried to purse but he was still too zoned out. No caffeine yet, an orgasm already – whatever the cause, everything was written right there, brightly legible, unmistakable in the silver rain light. “Yeah,” he said. His fingers pushed the short hairs at John’s neck the wrong way, and John shivered. Rodney smiled, finally, crookedly. “That couch sucks.”

They’d stayed in bed most of the day, venturing out for coffee and the Pop-tarts John had stocked the kitchen with. They slept and ate again, mostly naked on the couch, watching college football. They took a shower. Rodney cleaned John tenderly and thoroughly; he drew him back to the bed and fucked him, slow and careful, so careful.

They didn’t use a condom and neither of them talked about it; Rodney opened him with tongue and fingers and finally his cock, pushing in millimeter by millimeter while John shook and tried to breathe, rocking into the pillows under his hips, panting until it got easier, until it felt okay and then it felt good and then it felt, god, _fuck_, necessary. Rodney knelt behind him and kept one hand splayed on his back, centering him, grounding him. When Rodney came it was almost soundlessly. The steady rhythm he’d set up disintegrated and he whispered harshly: “Ah, oh, oh...” as he shuddered, blunt fingernails dragging down John’s spine. John rubbed himself, half-distracted, against the pillows and thought about the fact that Rodney McKay had just fucking come in him, wet thick spurts of come, and Jesus, that was _obscene_, it was – John came, just like that, back arching up and hips grinding down as a startled, pained shout was wrenched from him.

“I have to go in,” John said on Sunday morning.

“I haven’t even visited my cat,” Rodney exclaimed in comic horror.

John rolled his eyes and ran one hand along Rodney’s thigh: rough sparse hair and the solid line of Rodney’s leg, naked and warm under the cover. “I could make a really bad joke right now,” he said, yawning.

Rodney smirked and pushed him over, pressing his body onto John’s, weighing him down, holding him still, steady. “If you utter a sentence about missing pussy I swear to god I’ll castrate you myself,” he said, and lowered his mouth to John’s.

“I said I could,” John said when they stopped to breathe. “Not that I would.” Rodney’s back was smooth under his palms. “I’ve got a mission briefing at three, though.”

“I have to get on something that’ll get me back to Groom Lake,” Rodney sighed. He dropped his head onto John’s shoulder. “Shit.”

“Maybe I can come down soon,” John said. Fear prickled at the back of his throat, but he swallowed it. “They’ve gotta have something they want piloted, some freaky alien tech that needs a test flight.”

“Great, so you’ll blow up before you get within a hundred kilometers,” Rodney said into his neck. “That would be perfect.”

“I’ll get there,” John said. Rodney nodded and lay still, smothering him a little, pleasantly. “We never got weekends off, before.”

“Back home,” Rodney said, muffled.

John stroked Rodney's back and turned his head to breathe in the scent of his hair. “Yeah.”

At SGC Rodney stood fidgeting in John’s office, his laptop and change of clothing tucked into a backpack, hair still damp from the second shower they’d taken together. “I’ll see you next week, maybe,” Rodney said.

John nodded and reached past him to swing the door closed. He wanted to pull Rodney in for another kiss, because Rodney’s mouth looked so crooked and sad: unwary, tired again already. But there must be cameras – John knew they’d ignore a lot, but no sense in pushing it – so he just put his hand on Rodney’s shoulder, half on his neck, and squeezed. His thumb rested for an instant on Rodney’s pulse.

“This is a terrible idea,” John said. He smiled a little.

Rodney nodded and then shook his head. “Nah. I don’t have terrible ideas.” He smiled, just barely shaky. “Genius, remember?”

“Right,” John said.

Rodney left for the labs to badger Colonel Carter, or to badger someone into getting him back to Nevada, or both; John went to his computer to stare at the orders for the next day’s mission, training with an established team for one last week before SGC set him loose on the Milky Way.

John didn’t get to Area 51 soon, and Rodney didn’t get back to Colorado Springs.

They talked on the phone a lot, Rodney more subdued than usual. “I can’t even scar them properly,” he complained on John’s office line. “They get all flustered and apologetic and it’s not even fun when they cry. It’s like working with half a dozen Mikos,” Rodney snarled, voice echoing over the secure line, “except they’re not even _Miko_.”

John made a sympathetic noise and shifted his feet. Gosh, look at that – who’d have guessed that combat boots weren’t good for the 14 requisitions forms waiting for his signature. “Barney broke his pinky the other day while he was disassembling his P-90.”

“Which one is Barney?”

“I dunno. Jenkins? Jensen? Smith? Something like that.”

“It disturbs me that you’re giving your teammates names one step lower than the ones you gave the Wraith.”

John’s head fell back and he stared at the concrete ceiling. “It disturbs me that I wasn’t surprised he broke his pinky.”

Rodney’s sigh came crystal clear over the speakerphone, and John had the nervous urge to pick up the phone. Nobody should hear Rodney sighing like that over John’s phone. “I might be able to get back there next week,” Rodney said.

“I might be here to say hi, if Barney doesn’t shoot me accidentally.”

“Friendly fire isn’t,” Rodney deadpanned, and John snickered a little. “So should I –”

“Gotta go, Rodney. See you later.” John hung up, cutting Rodney off mid-sentence, which always gave him a wicked little zing of pleasure.

The next conversation was later, John lying in Rodney’s bed, Rodney in the “soulless box they call bachelor quarters around this godforsaken hellhole.” By the time Rodney had finished talking, the phone was digging into John’s ear and his hastily pushed-down BDUs were digging into the backs of his thighs; John’s hand and belly were sticky, breath coming in heaving gasps.

“You really shouldn’t hang up on me,” Rodney said breathlessly.

John’s eyes fluttered closed. “Was that supposed to be negative reinforcement?” he asked. “Because back at OTC they had a whole different approach, I gotta –"

“Colonel. John.” Rodney’s panting had slowed, and John pictured him, naked on his back on a boring polyester bedspread, cock softening, legs splayed out. “Why do you always hang up on me?”

“I like being able to shut you up,” John said.

There was a pause. “You’re such an asshole.”

“Yeah, I know.” John slid his fingers through the mess on his belly. “I should go clean up.”

“Wait.”

John waited, listening to Rodney breathe quietly for a moment.

“I’m coming down this weekend,” Rodney said. “It’s been nearly four weeks. And Carson said he's going to go see Elizabeth, make sure she's still alive. I'd like to see her, and Carson, and, well.” Rodney stopped, and the silence on the line hummed a little, mechanical, far away.

“I won’t be able to hang up on you.”

“That’s true.”

John could hear Rodney's smile, hear that it was a small one, but real.

“I’ll have to shut you up some other way."

Rodney yawned in his ear. “I’m sure you’ll think of something. I’ll be there Friday night. Hey, make sure to get some –"

John hung up the phone.

 

~ _end_ ~


End file.
